A weekly thread about the past
Last week, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bust was finally removed from the Tennessee state capitol. The predictable neo-Confederate voices, including the state’s Lieutenant Governor, are shrieking about “woke culture” ruining Tennessee heritage by no longer honoring the man responsible for the Ft. … Continue reading History Thread: That Devil Forrest
Another week without a proper header! I’m researching a couple of potential subjects for future threads, but they’ll take more research than a week or so of cramming so I’d rather hold off for now. I’m also starting to plan … Continue reading The History Thread Looks Ahead
Well, the History Thread is taking the week off from substantive writing. I’m mulling over a few topics for future threads but they’ll probably take a deeper research dive than usual to write about. (See: Reconstruction, voter suppression during.) And, … Continue reading A Low-Fi History Thread
In her own mind, Mary Steichen Calderone was hardly radical. She was a practicing Quaker and a well-regarded doctor; a mother of three, she expressed pride in her role as “a mother and a grandmother and a “great-grandmother.” Even at … Continue reading History Thread: Fighting “Raw Sex” in the Classroom
By the mid-1960s, many expected the next Civil Rights battleground to be in education. Martin Luther King lamented that “the history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the … Continue reading History Thread: Propaganda and Poppycock in “The Land of the Free”
Mesopotamia, the region roughly occupying modern Iraq, is one of the oldest inhabited areas of the Earth. It’s been settled, conquered and fought over for millennia, being the seat of many empires and the graveyard of others. But until relatively … Continue reading The History Thread Cooks the Mesopotamian Way
In 1914, white supremacy was as dominant in America as ever. Ben Tillman, the one-eyed Senator from South Carolina who in his youth led the Paramilitary Redshirts in taking over his state, proclaimed that “this is a white man’s country … Continue reading History Thread: William Monroe Trotter vs. D.W. Griffith
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race riot (or Tulsa race massacre), which resulted in the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the deaths of anywhere from 39 to 300 Black Tulsans at the hands … Continue reading The History Thread Remembers Tulsa
In 1974, America was coming apart at the seams. Disillusioned by Watergate, infuriated by foreign oil embargoes and spikes in meat prices, frightened by terrorism, cults and kidnapped heiresses, depressed by an economic downturn, there seemed little respite from misery. … Continue reading History Thread: The Year of Pitching Dangerously
24 December 1978, Chicago: 24-year old radio DJ Steve Dahl was fired from radio station WDAI as part of the station’s switch from AOR to disco. At his new workplace – rival AOR station WLUP – Dahl indulged in both … Continue reading The History Thread Tries to Demolish Disco
In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were stricken with the disease near modern-day Montreal. The symptoms were gruesome: Cartier’s men “had all their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour: then did it ascend … Continue reading History Thread: The Triumph of Scurvy
During a recent visit to Fort Ligonier, I was impressed anew with their remarkably thorough, well-curated exhibit on the Seven Years War. This visit, I found myself particularly struck by a mural-sized reproduction of the famous painting, The Execution of … Continue reading History Thread: To Kill an Admiral
For all the recent outpouring of World War I books, it’s doubtful whether most add anything significant to existing scholarship. Some, like Max Hasting’s Catastrophe 1914, are well-written but don’t deviate from the classic Barbara Tuchman narrative. The converse are books … Continue reading History Thread: Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel (2014)
Note: I haven’t done a Things That Are Not article in awhile, and wanted a break from the heavier military-political focus of recent threads. Prepare to be spooked! Sailors and ocean travelers have always entertained and scared each other with … Continue reading History Thread: The Curse of the Ivan Vassili
In October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis poised the world on the cusp of nuclear oblivion, President John F. Kennedy encouraged his staff and military leaders to read The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman’s chronicle of the outbreak of … Continue reading History Thread: Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962)
Header image from National Lampoon (October 1973), art by Dick Ayers. All other illustrations are from New York Magazine’s The Illustrated Secret History of Watergate, online here. Last Tuesday, Nixon henchman and Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy died at age … Continue reading History Thread: Gordon Liddy’s Greatest Hits
Note: I didn’t have time to create a header from scratch, so here is an in-depth review of one of my favorite popular history books. Cecil Woodham-Smith (1896-1977) was born of an Irish family in Wales. Marrying a London solicitor, … Continue reading History Thread: Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1953)
In 1759, a wealthy young brewer named Arthur Guinness used his inheritance to take out a 9000-year lease, at £45 a year, on an old brewery at St James’s Gate, on the western edge of Dublin city. It was, of … Continue reading A Pint of Plain for the History Thread
Maria Bochkareva came from the most hardscrabble background a Russian could imagine. Born to peasants in Tomsk, Siberia, she endured an abusive father who regularly beat her and her siblings. She married at age 15 to escape her wretched home … Continue reading History Thread: The Women’s Battalion of Death
In yesterday’s OT we discussed the popularity of baseball outside the United States, which is more widespread (and long-lasting) than a casual observer might think. Japan, in particular, has been enamored of the sport since its introduction there in 1872. … Continue reading The History Thread Visits Japan
This header is inspired by another encounter with one of the Republican Party’s favorite bad faith arguments about race and racism. Did you know that the Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan and that Republicans were the Party of Lincoln? … Continue reading The History Thread Considers the Dixiecrat Fallacy
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